48 Quotes by Joseph O'Neill

...bright-shirted racers of the Tour de France zoomed by like fantastically bicycling macaws.

The word "Yankee" itself, I was informed, came from that simplest of Dutch names - Jan.

There was another silence. I felt, above all, tired. Tiredness: if there was a constant symptom of the disease in our lives at this time, it was tiredness. At work we were unflagging; at home the smallest gesture of liveliness was beyond us. Mornings we awoke into a malign weariness that seemed only to have refreshed itself overnight.

Like an old door, ever man past a certain age comes with historical warps and creaks of one kind or another, and a woman who wishes to put him to serious further use must expect to do a certain amount of sanding and planing.

One of the great pluses of being an immigrant is you get to start again in terms of your identity. You get to shed the narratives which cling to you.

I think you sense the metaphorical resonance of what you're writing without analysing it too carefully. That leads you down dead ends. You stop imagining things and start writing towards these themes.

I think if you're writing about cricket, you're obviously writing about power, because cricket is such a loaded sport, much more so than soccer.

Novel-writing is a bit like deception. You lie as little as you possibly can. That's the way I do it, anyway.

I'm completely cricketed out. If I never have to write another word about cricket again, I'll be a happy man.